Conspiracy, Poverty, and Lost Children in Tracy Letts's Bug And

Conspiracy, Poverty, and Lost Children in Tracy Letts’s Bug and The X-Files THOMAS FAHY In the fifth season of the 1990s hit television series The X-Files, federal agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) finds himself strapped to a hospital bed for psychiatric evaluation: “Five years together. You must have seen this coming,” he quips to his partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) (“Folie à Deux”). Mental illness looms large in the series, but it tends to function as misdirection. Whether through “spooky” Mulder’s reputation for being “out there,” the Lone Gunmen’s conspiracy theories, or the general view of alien abductees as crackpots, The X-Files uses characters routinely dismissed as “crazy” to locate truth in the strange and conspiratorial. The protagonist in “Duane Barry,” for example, takes several people hostage after escaping from a mental hospital, yet his story of repeated abductions inspires one unnamed hostage to tell him: “I just want to say that I believe you.” The show’s creator, Chris Carter, discusses the strategy behind these moments in the DVD commentary to “Fallen Angel”: “It’s a journey for Mulder and Scully to see—and for the audience to see—that these people who are crying wolf might be doing it for a reason […], that they may be credible, seeing and knowing things that we don’t.” Just as the reasons for crying wolf often involve government conspiracies, Mulder and Scully’s investigations also uncover profound social inequalities at the heart of American culture. The oppressiveness and alienation of systemic poverty offer one example of this, and these economic narratives suggest that the real danger of conspiracy does not come from believing in aliens per se but in allowing these theories to deflect from social problems that demand action. Thomas Fahy is a professor of English at Long Island University, Post. He has published numerous books and edited collections, including Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, The Writing Dead: Talking Terror with TV’s Top Horror Writers, Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, and Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre. He is currently writing a book about Tracy Letts. He can be reached at [email protected]. The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 Copyright © 2019 273 274 Fahy While The X-Files emerged as one of the most popular and influential shows at the end of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts was writing and revising his second play, Bug. The work premiered in London in 1996, and he spent the next decade revising it for various productions. As Letts explains, “the play wasn’t worked out. It took a long time and a lot of productions for me to work out some of the problems with it” (Kenber). One of the great innovations of Bug involves its preoccupation with the unseen. Specifically, its psychological exploration of paranoia continually navigates between the real and the imaginary, the factual and conspiratorial. One never sees a bug onstage, and throughout most of the play, the sound of insects can be attributed to either the air conditioner, a distant helicopter, or the hum of traffic. Yet the actors playing Agnes White and Peter Evans respond visibly to the supposed infestation. They swat the air, squish bugs with their fingers, and scratch skin. As Uni Chaudhuri notes in her discussion of the play, “watching other people scratching themselves can cause people to start feeling an itch themselves” and this social contagion—much like one’s response to a yawn—establishes a physiological connection to the drama (332). One’s body becomes convinced of the protagonists’ claims. These elements force viewers to share in Peter and Agnes’s paranoid mindset, enabling Letts to capture both the appeal of and problem with conspiracy theories. Despite providing answers and comfort for the disenfranchised, conspiracy ultimately proves palliative. It provides no meaningful way to bring about social change. Throughout Bug and The X-Files, conspiracy also gets linked with the pain of abducted, abandoned, or dead children. Agnes’s son, Lloyd, was kidnapped from a grocery store nearly ten years earlier, and she convinces herself that his disappearance is part of a government experiment to breed scientifically engineered bugs in her body. Fox Mulder constructs a similar narrative about loss. Once he learns about his sister’s abduction through regression hypnosis, he links it with a government plot to hide the existence of extraterrestrial life from the public. For both Agnes and Mulder, conspiracy theories provide solace. They help make sense of profound loss. They offer answers for the inconceivable, such as the abduction or death of a child, and they provide an epic narrative for trauma. Personal tragedies can often feel inconsequential in the broader context of day-to-day life, yet conspiracy theories give a grandeur to individual loss. They enable these protagonists to craft intricate stories whose scope matches the depth of their suffering. Conspiracy, Poverty and Lost Children 275 At the same time, Bug and The X-Files use the conspiracy genre—as opposed to conspiracy theories themselves—as a vehicle for cultural critique. Its narratives about lost children, either among the working poor or among middle-class families victimized by a working-class predator, draw attention to the socioeconomic conditions facilitating exploitation and resentment, and they challenge audiences to recognize the dangers of systemic poverty. Beginning with an overview of the conspiracy genre, this article examines the link between poverty and abduction in Bug and The X-Files. Ultimately, Letts’s play and Carter’s series use missing children to represent the forgotten poor and the risks of not seeing social inequality as a social crisis. Confronting the truth about these abductions, these works suggest, requires confronting uncomfortable truths about American society more broadly. It requires the individual to do something about injustice. Conspiracy Narratives and Economic Hardship Most scholars consider the 1960s a turning point in conspiracy culture as greater disillusionment with the US government emerged after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. According to Peter Knight, the aftermath of these deaths made conspiracy theories “a regular feature of everyday political and cultural life, not so much an occasional outburst of countersubversive invective as part and parcel of many people’s normal way of thinking about who they are and how the world works” (2). Indeed, a general distrust of the powers-that-be took hold by the end of the decade, and this mindset dovetailed with the disaffection of the countercultural movement. Whether through protests against the Vietnam War, the start of the environmental movement, the rallying cry against patriarchal oppression, or the beginning of the gay rights movement, these efforts forged an antiestablishment sensibility that resonated with millions. It considered white, heterosexist, male-dominated power structures to be the problem. It encouraged skepticism and distrust. And it radically shifted the way Americans perceived the government between the 1960s and 1990s. Prior to 1960, national polls revealed that 75 percent of Americans trusted the government, but that number would drop to 25 percent by 1994 (Knight 36). By the 1990s, in other words, conspiracy theory had moved from the fringes to the mainstream, characterizing the way most Americans viewed the government. Theories about secret plots and cover-ups, as Theodore Zlolkowski notes, have found their artistic counterpart in the conspiracy genre (4). This genre typically 276 Fahy features protagonists joined together by a sense of alienation,1 placing them on a quest to uncover and destroy a mysterious agenda that threatens themselves and society. According to Adrian Wisnicki, these narratives have six distinct characteristics: 1) a conspiracy theorist, 2) a paranoid subject, 3) the “hidden hand,” 4) inaccessible authorities, 5) men plotting to defraud, and 6) a vanishing subject. The conspiracy theorist (a descendant of the literary detective) and paranoid subject offer a hypothesis that makes sense of and provides a means for resisting the threats posed by a conspiracy. This secret plot tends to be masterminded by inaccessible authorities or an oppressive group, such as the government or military, and oftentimes one character, or “hidden hand,” manipulates events or people behind the scenes (Wisnicki 16). Although the plot to defraud involves two men planning to steal a widow’s fortune in Victorian literature contemporary conspiracies regularly feature governments and corporations obfuscating the truth for financial, social, or political gain (Wisnicki 85). Finally, the vanishing subject refers to “a figure who somehow disappears in response to the oppression/surveillance of the authorities” (Wisnicki 16). These vanishing figures remain relatively undefined, allowing other characters—as well as the audience—to interpret their significance (Wisnicki 130). The neatness of these characteristics, however, raises questions about the genre’s effectiveness for political engagement. As many scholars have noted, the conspiracy genre often responds to the longing for closure and unity in postmodernism with the assertion that everything is interconnected and

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